Alessandro Verri between Enlightenment and Tradition

Alessandro Verri (1741-1816) was a remarkable intellectual, philosopher, historian, and man of letters from Milan, lived through the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism. He is remembered for his friendship with Cesare Beccaria and his contributions to the magazine Il Caffè, which he founded with his brother Pietro.He began writing his most famous novel, Via di Erostrato (Life of Herostratus), in 1793, a year after being admitted to the Academy of Arcadia in Rome under the initiatory name of Aristander Pentelicus. The work, which was published only in 1815, a year before his death, is a unique and compelling historical novel in which the author, pretending to translate a genuine Greek text—a literary device Verri had already used years earlier in Notti romane al sepolcro degli Scipioni—imaginatively (but not entirely) narrates the adventurous and dramatic life of Herostratus, a Greek from Corinth. After a life filled with failures and disappointments, and for the sole purpose of being remembered by posterity, Erostratus deliberately set fire to the majestic Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.